Name a battle from each war.

1. Name a battle from each war. • Am Rev • Civil War • WWI • WWII • Vietnam • Iraq/Afghanistan

2. Which of LBJ’s options is each quote advocating? • “Perhaps, [the most important move that we should take is], the introduction into the Pacific Theater massive forces to deal with any escalatory response, including forces evidently aimed at China as well as North Vietnam, should the Chinese Communists enter the game…..At this stage of history we are the greatest power in the world – if we behave like it.” • “This is not the last inning in the struggle against communism. We must pick those spots where the stakes are highest for us and we have the greatest ability to prevail. I don’t believe we can win in Vietnam. If we lose 50,000 men it will ruin us. Five years, billions of dollars, 50,000 men – it is not for us.” • “The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied….The contest in Vietnam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purpose.” • “The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong….No one has demonstrated that a white ground force of whatever size can win a guerrilla war – which is at the same time a civil war between Asians – in jungle terrain in the midst of a population that refuses cooperation to the white forces (and the South Vietnamese)…”

3. What are 3 rules of war? Should there even be rules of war?

4. Rules of Engagement of Organized Butchery? • “We were fighting in the cruelest kind of conflict, a people’s war. It was no orderly campaign as in Europe, but a war for survival waged in a wilderness without rules or laws; a war in which each soldier fought for his own life and the lives of the men beside him, not caring how he killed in that personal cause or how many or in what manner and feeling only contempt for those who sought to impose on his savage struggle the mincing distinctions of civilized warfare – that code of battlefield ethics that attempted to humanize an essentially inhuman war. According to those rules of engagement, it was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking; it was wrong to shoot an enemy prisoner at close range, but right for a sniper at long range to kill an enemy soldier who was no more able than a prisoner to defend himself; it was wrong for infantrymen to destroy a village with white phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it. Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong killing people at long range with sophisticated weapons.”

5. How did we fight the Vietnam War? • 1955-64 “Advisory” Role Train/fund ARVN so they fight commies • 1961-65 Counterinsurgency small unit, spec forces – infiltrate enemy • 1965-1969 Escalation of ground forces 70,000 to 550,000 troops on search and destroy missions along with massive bombing, counterinsurgency Destroy enemy-friendly villages – “No villages, no guerrillas. Simple.” Vietnam becomes a QUAGMIRE! • 1969-1973 Vietnamization Train ARVN to fight while getting ground troops out; INCREASE BOMBING Technology and superior firepower was supposed to win out….It didn’t.

8. Military Situation in Vietnam “Unlike WWII or Korea, the Vietnam conflict was a frontless war. There were no territorial objectives to be taken. There was no vital center of enemy resistance to be destroyed; all of South Vietnam was a fluid battlefield…Battles occurred over the entire country. They could occur whenever and wherever the VC or PAVN [NVA] forces picked a fight. They could occur in remote, sparsely populated highlands or they could occur amid the populous delta and coastal regions. The American objective in these sporadic encounters was to kill as many of the enemy as possible while using their superior air mobility and firepower to minimize their own casualties.”

14. How do you know if you’re winning? • Body Count Dead and Vietnamese = VC Captured weapon = 5 VC “For every Am we lost, we killed 13 NVAs” Inflated counts, inexact, pressure to succeed

15. Air War and Pacification • Air War – break enemy’s will end capacity to make war stop flow of supplies • Pacification – The Phoenix Program Propaganda to cause defection from VC Covert ops to destroy enemy infrastructure in SV

16. NAPALM

18. List two problems facing South Vietnam in the early to mid 1960s. • Develop a solution to one of those problems.